What started as a wine-fueled story in a war-ravaged Beirut hotel room became a book — and now it could be a movie.
James Linville, a screenwriter and George Plimpton’s former deputy at The Paris Review, has optioned the film rights to “The Forgiven” by Lawrence Osborne.
The acclaimed novel came out last year, but Linville first heard the story in 2005, in the aftermath of the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, when scores of journalists descended on Beirut.
One of them, Christopher Hitchens, a man who had vowed never to encounter a swastika without defacing it, was roughed up by a gang of Syrians for graffitiing their sign. The area was tense. That same weekend, Osborne and Linville were dining sumptuously with an Arab warlord.
When the pistol-packing potentate proudly told them he’d made the wine himself and asked “You like it?,” the two conflict-avoiding columnists eagerly assured him they loved it. Later, they were dismayed to find out the warlord knew where they were staying, because he had delivered jeroboams more of the vintage to their hotels.
Determined to finish the bottles off that very night, Osborne recounted a story that had long haunted him, of a roadside accident during weekend revels at a castle in the Atlas Mountains of southern Morocco.
That story became “The Forgiven.”
Linville told me from his home in London that Plimpton had taught him many things over the years. For instance, at book launch parties, “having enough ice is much more important than having enough canapes.
“But I’m afraid George never gave any advice on what to do when a guest arrives with a dead body in the back seat of their car.” Linville’s dream casting for the role of a host in that awkward predicament? “Morgan Freeman. Who else could convincingly keep it together in that sort of crisis?”